1988 - Stinger Read online

  Jessie shook her head. The noise was getting louder. She turned the ignition key and pumped the accelerator; still the engine wouldn’t fire. She heard the crackle of static electricity in her hair, and she caught sight of her wristwatch: the digital display had gone mad, the hours flickering past at runaway speed. This’ll be some story to tell Tom, she thought as she flinched in a cocoon of ear-piercing noise, and she reached out to grasp Stevie’s hand.

  The child’s head jerked to the right; her eyes widened, and she screamed, “Mama!”

  She’d seen what was coming, and now Jessie did too. She slammed on the brake, her hands fighting the wheel.

  What looked like a flaming locomotive was hurtling through the air, burning parts flying off behind it and spinning away. It passed over Cobre Road, about fifty feet over the desert and maybe forty yards in front of Jessie’s truck; she could make out a cylindrical form, glowing red-hot and surrounded by flames, and as the truck went off the road the object passed with a shriek that deafened Jessie and prevented her from hearing her own scream. She saw the rear of the object explode in yellow and violet flames, flinging pieces off in all directions; something came at the truck in a blur, and there was a wham! of metal being struck and the pickup shuddered right down to its frame.

  A front tire blew. The truck kept going over rocks and through stands of cactus before Jessie got it stopped, her palms sweat-slick on the wheel. The ringing in her ears still kept her from hearing, but she saw Stevie’s frantic, tear-streaked face and she said, as calmly as she could, “Hush, now. It’s over. It’s all over. Hush, now.”

  Steam was shooting from around the truck’s crumpled hood. Jessie looked to her left, saw the flaming object pass over a low ridge and disappear from sight. My God! she thought, stunned. What was it?

  In the next instant there was a roaring that penetrated even through Jessie’s aural murk. The pickup’s cab filled with whirling dust. Jessie grasped Stevie’s hand, and the little girl’s fingers clamped shut.

  There was dust in Jessie’s mouth and in her eyes, and her cap had blown out the window. When she got her vision cleared again, she saw three gray-green helicopters, flying in a tight V formation about thirty or forty feet above the desert, following the flaming object toward the southwest. They too went over the ridge and out of sight. Up in the blue, the contrails of several jets also tracked to the southwest.

  The dust settled. Jessie began to get her hearing back; Stevie was sobbing, holding on to her mother’s hand for dear life. “It’s over,” Jessie said, and heard her own raspy voice. “All over.” She felt like crying herself, but mothers didn’t do such things. The engine ticked like a rusty heart, and Jessie found herself staring at a geyser of steam that rose from a small round hole right in the center of the pickup’s hood.

  * * *

  3

  Queen of Inferno

  “Christ’s drawers, what a racket!” the white-haired woman wearing a pink silk sleep mask cried out, sitting up in her canopied bed. The entire house seemed to be vibrating with noise, and she angrily pulled the mask off to reveal eyes the color of arctic ice. “Tania! Miguel!” she shouted in a voice made husky by too many unfiltered cigarettes. “Get in here!” She reached for the bell cord beside her bed and started yanking it. Down in the depths of the Preston mansion, the bell clamored for the servants’ attention.

  But the horrendous, roaring noise was gone now; it had only lasted a few seconds, but long enough to shock her awake. She threw the covers back, got out of bed, and strode to the balcony doors like a tornado on legs. When she flung them open, the heat almost sucked the breath right out of her lungs. She went out, squinting toward Cobre Road with one hand warding off the glare. She was fifty-three years old, but even without glasses her vision was sharp enough to see what had passed dangerously near the house: three helicopters, racing away toward the southwest and raising a storm of dust beneath them. They vanished behind that dust after a few more seconds, and Celeste Preston was so mad she could’ve spat nails.

  Stout, moon-faced Tania came to the balcony doors. She was braced for the onslaught. “Sí, Señora Preston?”

  “Where were you? I thought we were bein’ bombed! What the hell’s goin’ on?”

  “I don’t know, señora. I think—”

  “Oh, just get me a drink!” she snapped. “My nerves are shot!”

  Tania retreated into the house for her mistress’s first drink of the day. Celeste stood on the high balcony, its floor a mosaic of red Mexican clay tiles, and grasped the ornate wrought-iron railing. From this vantage point she could see the estate’s stables, the corral, and the riding track—useless, of course, since all the horses had been auctioned off. The blacktopped driveway circled a large bed of what had once been peonies and daisies, now burned brown since the sprinkler system was inoperative. Her lemon-yellow gown was sticking to her back; the sweat and heat rekindled her fury. She returned to the cooler temperature of the bedroom, picked up the pink telephone, and punched the numbers with a manicured fingernail.

  “Sheriff’s office,” a drawling voice answered. A boy’s voice. “Deputy Chaffin speak—”

  “Put Vance on the phone,” she interrupted.

  “Uh… Sheriff Vance is on patrol right now. Is this—”

  “Celeste Preston. I want to know who’s flyin’ helicopters over my property at”—her eye located the clock on the white bedstand—“at seven-twelve in the mornin’! The bastards almost took my roof off!”

  “Helicopters?”

  “Clean the wax out of your ear, boy! You heard me! Three helicopters! If they’d been any closer, they could’ve folded my damn sheets! What’s goin’ on?”

  “Uh… I don’t know, Mrs. Preston.” The deputy’s voice sounded more alert now, and Celeste imagined him sitting at attention behind his desk. “I can get Sheriff Vance over the radio for you, if you want.”

  “I want. Tell him to get out here pronto.” She hung up before he could reply. Tania had come in and offered the woman a Bloody Mary on one of the last sterling silver trays. Celeste took it, stirred up the hot peppers with a celery stick, and took most of it down in a couple of swallows. Tania had added more Tabasco than usual today, but Celeste didn’t wince. “Who do I have to jaw with today?” She ran the glass’s frosty rim over her high, lined forehead.

  “No one. Your schedule’s clear.”

  “Thank God and jingle my spurs! Bunch of damned bloodsuckers gonna let me rest a spell, huh?”

  “You have appointments with Mr. Weitz and Mr. O’Connor on Monday morning,” Tania reminded her.

  “That’s Monday. I might be dead by then.” She finished off her drink and plunked the glass back on the silver tray. The thought of returning to bed entered her mind, but she was too keyed up now. The last six months had been one legal headache after another, not to mention the damage done to her soul. Sometimes she felt like God’s punching bag, and she knew she’d done a lot of down-and-dirty things in her life, but she was paying for her sins in spades.

  “Is there anything else?” Tania asked, her dark eyes steady and impassive.

  “No, that’s it.” But Celeste changed her mind before Tania could reach the massive, polished redwood door. “Wait a minute. Hold on.”

  “Yes, señora?”

  “I didn’t mean to jump down your throat awhile ago. It’s just… you know, times bein’ what they are.”

  “I understand, señora.”

  “Good. Listen, anytime you and Miguel want to unlock the bar for yourselves, might as well go ahead.” She shrugged. “Ain’t no sense lettin’ the liquor go to waste.”

  “I’ll remember that, Mrs. Preston.”

  Celeste knew she wouldn’t. Neither Tania nor her husband drank, and anyway somebody had to stay clearheaded around here, if just to keep the human vultures away. Her flinty gaze locked with Tania’s. “You know, in thirty-four years you’ve always called me either ‘Mrs. Preston’ or ‘señora.’ Haven’t you once wanted to call me �
�Celeste’?”

  Tania hesitated. Shook her head. “Not once, señora.”

  Celeste laughed; it was the hearty laughter of a woman who was no stranger to the hard life, who once had been proud of the rodeo dirt under her fingernails and knew that winning and losing were two sides of the same coin. “You’re a card, Tania! I know you’ve never liked me worth a buzzard’s fart, but you’re all right.” Her smile faded. “I appreciate your stayin’ on these last few months. You didn’t have to.”

  “Mr. Preston was always very kind to us. We wanted to repay the debt.”

  “You have.” Her eyes narrowed slightly. “But tell me one thing, and tell me true: would the first Mrs. Preston have handled this shit mess any better?”

  The other woman’s expression was flat and without emotion. “No,” she said finally. “The first Mrs. Preston was a beautiful, gracious woman—but she didn’t have your courage.”

  Celeste grunted. “Yeah, and she wasn’t crazy, either. That’s why she hightailed it out of this hellhole forty years ago!”

  Tania abruptly veered back to familiar ground: “Will there be anything else, señora?”

  “Nope. But I’m expectin’ the sheriff pretty soon, so listen up.”

  Her back straight and stiff, Tania left the bedroom. Her footsteps clicked away on the oak floor in the long corridor outside.

  Celeste listened, realizing how empty a house without furniture sounded. There were a few pieces left, of course, like the bed and her dressing table and the dining-room table downstairs, but not much. She walked across the room, took a thin black cheroot from a silver filigreed case. The French crystal lighter had already gone to the auction house, so Celeste lit her cigar with a pack of matches that advertised the Bob Wire Club on Highway 67. Then she went out again to the balcony, where she exhaled the pungent smoke and lifted her face toward the brutal sun.

  Going to be another god-awful hot one, she thought. But she’d lived through worse. And would again. All this tangled-up mess with the lawyers, the state of Texas, and the Internal Revenue Service was going to pass like a cloud in a high wind, and then she’d get on with her life.

  “My life,” she said, and the lines around her mouth etched deep. She’d come a long way from a bayside shack in Galveston, she mused. Now she was standing on the balcony of a thirty-six-room Spanish-style hacienda on a hundred acres of land—even if the house was without furniture and the land was rocky desert. In the garage was a canary-yellow Cadillac, the last of the six cars. On the mansion’s walls were empty spaces where Miro, Rockwell, and Dali paintings used to hang; those were among the first to be auctioned, along with the French antique furniture and Wint’s collection of almost a thousand stuffed rattlesnakes.

  Her bank account was frozen tighter than an Eskimo’s balls, but a regiment of Dallas lawyers was working on the problem and she knew that any day now she’d get a call from that office with the seven names; they’d say, “Mrs. Preston? Good news, hon! We’ve tracked down the missing funds, and the IRS has agreed to take their back taxes in monthly payments. You’re out of the woods! Yes, ma’am, old Wint took care of you after all!”

  Old Wint, Celeste knew, had been slicker than owl shit. He’d danced around government safety regulations and tax codes, corporate laws and bank presidents like a Texas whirlwind, and the stroke that had kicked him out of this world on the second day of December, at the age of eighty-seven, had left her to pay the band.

  She looked east, toward Inferno and the mine. Over sixty years ago, Winter Thedford Preston had come south from Odessa with a mule called Inferno, searching for gold in the scrub lands. The gold had eluded him, but he’d found a crimson mountain that the Mexicali Indians had told him was made of sacred, healing dust. Wint had a knack for metallurgy—though his formal education had ended at the seventh grade—and his nose had not picked up the scent of sacred dust but of rich copper ore. Wint had started his mining company with a single clapboard shack, fifty or so Mexicans and Indians, a couple of trucks, and a whole lot of shovels. The first day of digging had turned up a dozen skeletons, and it was then that Wint realized the Mexicalis had been burying their dead in the mountain for over a hundred years.

  And then one day a Mexican with a pickax had uncovered a sparkling vein of high-grade ore a hundred feet wide. That was the first of many. The new Texas companies that were stringing telephone wires, electric lines, and water pipes across the state came knocking at Wint’s door. And just beyond the mountain of ore a few tents sprang up, then clapboard and adobe houses, followed by stone structures, churches, and schools. Dirt roads were covered with gravel, then pavement. Celeste recalled that Wint had told her he’d looked over his shoulder one day and seen a town where there used to be tumbleweeds. The townspeople, most of them mine workers, had elected him mayor, and under the influence of tequila Wint had christened the town Inferno and vowed to build a statue of his faithful old mule at its center.

  But, though there’d been plenty of fits and starts, Inferno had never grown much beyond a one-mule town. It was too hot and dusty, too far from the big cities, and when the water pipeline ruptured, people got thirsty in a mighty big hurry. The copper mine had remained the only real industry. But folks kept coming in, the Ice House plugged into the pipeline and froze water into blocks, the church bells rang on Sunday mornings, the shopkeepers made money, the telephone company strung lines and trained operators, the high school lettered the football and basketball teams, and a concrete bridge replaced the shaky wooden one that spanned the Snake River. The first nails were driven into the boards of Bordertown. Walt Travis was elected sheriff, and in his third month was shot dead on the street that was thereafter named for him. The next man stuck with the job until he was beaten within a finger of St. Peter’s handshake and woke up on a northbound train. Gradually, year after year, Inferno sank its roots. But just as gradually, the Preston Copper Mining Company was chewing away the red mountain where the dead Indians of a hundred years slept.

  Celeste Street used to be called Pearl Street, after Wint’s first wife. Between wives, it was known as Nameless Street. Such was the power of Wint Preston’s influence.

  She took one last pull on the cheroot, crushed it out on the railing, and flicked it into space. “We had some high old times, didn’t we?” she said softly. But they’d fought like cats and dogs too, ever since Celeste had met him when she was singing with a cowboy band at a little dive in Galveston. Celeste hadn’t minded; she had a holler like a cement mixer and could cuss Satan into church. The truth was that she’d fallen in love with Wint over the years, in spite of his womanizing and drinking and gambling. In spite of the fact that he kept her in the dark about his business affairs for more than thirty years. And when the machines had begun scraping bottom less than three years ago and frantic dynamiting uncovered no new veins, Wint Preston had seen his dream dying. What Celeste realized now was that Wint had gone nutty; he’d started pulling money out of his accounts, selling his stocks and bonds and gathering cash in a maniacal frenzy. But what he’d done with almost eight million dollars remained a mystery. Maybe he’d opened up new accounts under false names; maybe he’d put all that cash into tin boxes and buried them in the desert. In any case, the money of a lifetime was gone, and when the IRS had swooped down demanding a huge chunk of back taxes and penalties, there was nothing to pay with.

  The lawyers had the mess now. Celeste knew full well that she was simply a caretaker, en route back to the dives of Galveston.

  She saw the sheriff’s blue-and-gray patrol car turning off Cobre Road and coming slowly along the blacktop. She gripped the railing with both hands and waited, a tough one-hundred-and-ten-pound figure backed by a hollow three-thousand-ton house. She stood without moving as the car made the driveway’s circle and stopped.

  The car’s door opened, and a man who more than doubled her weight got out in sweat-saving slow motion. The back of his pale blue shirt was drenched, as was the sweatband of his beige cowboy hat. His belly flop
ped over his jeans, and he wore a gunbelt and lizard-skin boots.

  “You took your damned time, didn’t you?” Celeste called sharply. “If the house had been on fire, I’d be standin’ in ashes right now!”

  Sheriff Ed Vance stopped, looked up, and found her on the balcony. He was wearing sunglasses with mirrored lenses, just like his favorite bad-ass in the movie Cool Hand Luke. Last night’s dinner of enchiladas and refried beans gurgled in his bulging belly. He showed his teeth in a tight grin. “If the house had been on fire,” he said, his drawl as sugary as hot molasses, “I hope you would’ve had the good sense to call the fire department, Miz Preston.” She said nothing, just stared holes through him. “Deputy Chaffin gave me a call,” he continued. “Said you was gettin’ buzzed by helicopters.” He made a big show of inspecting the cloudless sky. “Nary a one around here.”

  “There were three. They flew over my property, and I’ve never heard such a noise in all my life. I want to know where they came from and what’s goin’ on.”

  He shrugged his thick shoulders. “Don’t seem like much is goin’ on anywhere, if you ask me. Seems like a pretty peaceful day.” His grin widened; now it was more of a grimace. “Up till now, that is.”

  “They went that way.” Celeste pointed toward the southwest.

  “Well, maybe if I hurry I can head ’em off at the pass. Just what is it you expect me to do, Miz Preston?”

  “I expect you to earn your pay, Sheriff Vance!” she replied coldly. “That means bein’ on top of what goes on around here! I’m tellin’ you that three helicopters almost knocked me out of my bed, and I want to know who they belonged to! Does that spell it out any clearer for you?”

  “A mite.” The grimace remained locked on his square, heavily jowled face. “’Course, they’re probably in Mexico by now.”